The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: How Freud Explains

Originally published in 1901, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was Freud's most widely accepted book initially, and at the time became the most popular of all his works. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, one of Freud's most translated and reprinted books, written to introduce psychoanalysis to the general public, receives a thought-provoking analysis by Silvia Alexim. The psychoanalyst connects the ideas in this text with another fundamental work: The Interpretation of Dreams. She explores Freud's postulation of a divided psyche, in which dreams and waking life manifestations can be understood as a continuum. The author shows how, from the development of the hypothesis of the unconscious, Freud distanced himself from the medical perspective and the psychology of consciousness, marked by rationalism. Thus, subjectivity began to be understood by psychoanalysis increasingly as an "open work" subject to multiple influences and reconfigurations.